late May, 2005
- Man who was voice of Tony the Tiger dies
(Yahoo! News / AFP, May 24, 2005)
Thurl Ravenscroft, who provided the rumbling "They're Grrrrreeeat!" for Tony the Tiger in countless Kellogg's ads and voiced a host of Disney characters, has died. He was 91. Ravenscroft was born in Norfork, Neb. ... For more than 50 years, Ravenscroft was the affable voice behind Tony the Tiger, TV's popular cartoon pitchman for Kellogg's Frosted Flakes. ... Ravenscroft left Nebraska for California in 1933 to study art. By the mid-1930s he was appearing regularly on radio and by the late-1930s he was singing backup for Bing Crosby. After military service during World War II, he returned to Hollywood, where he sang with the Mellomen, a group that performed with Frank Sinatra, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and Elvis Presley. ...
- Women can testify that Phil Spector waved gun at them: judge
(Yahoo! News / AFP, May 23, 2005)
A judge ruled that four women who claim that legendary pop music producer Phil Spector pointed guns at them will be allowed to testify at his murder trial. Spector, 64, who produced tracks for musical giants including the Beatles and Elvis Presley, is charged with shooting B-movie actress Lana Clarkson in the face in his hilltop mansion in Los Angeles in February 2003. The inventor of the 1960s' "Wall of Sound" recording technique has pleaded innocent to the charge and is due to go on trial on September 16. ...
- What Does Forest Lawn Have In Common with Cream, Elvis Presley, Pink Floyd, Frank Sinatra, Loretta Lynn, Bono, and Jimi Hendrix?
(BUSINESS WIRE, May 23, 2005)
The Answer Lies in Forest Lawn(R) Museum's Ground-Breaking Exhibit, "Revolutions," Featuring Works by Artists Who Defined Musical Culture Visually as Well as a Special Showing of "Taken by Storm: Album Art of Storm Thorgerson". "Revolutions," a ground-breaking, free exhibit that features the artists behind the images synonymous with identifying the pop culture of the '60s and into the new Millennium, opens July 31st at Forest Lawn Museum in Glendale. ...
- Railroader lives Elvis dream
By JEFF GEARINO
(Jackson Hole Star-Tribune, May 23, 2005)
For Wheatland's Oscar Sosa, it was the King's greatest show. For those too young to remember or too old to forget, it was Jan. 14, 1973, and at the time it was one of the biggest events ever. Elvis Presley taped his "Aloha from Hawaii" concert at the Honolulu International Center Arena, and the show was beamed around the world by satellite to over 1.5 billion people in 40 countries. More than 50 percent of the households in America tuned in, more than watched man's first walk on the moon. "I think that was his finest hour," said Sosa, Wyoming's premier, and most likely Wyoming's only, international "Elvis tribute artist." ...
- Music City croaks during allergy season: Pollen and pollutants postpone recording sessions
(CNN.com / Associated Press, May 23, 2005)
For a town where so many people earn their living with a clear voice and a keen ear, Nashville sure is a lousy place for singers. It sits in a moist, green bowl where pollens and pollutants get trapped in the air and give allergy sufferers fits. Spring and fall are the worst -- so bad that some artists have to delay their recording sessions. ... The biggest problem for most is nasal drainage. "It affects the resonance and the feedback they get when they're singing," Garrett said. "A lot of the professional singers will wear monitors. They rely on the feedback of their voice to help them find the notes and help with loudness. When they're congested in the nasal passages, it makes it very difficult." ... Nashville lies in a gently rolling basin surrounded by the western and eastern Highland Rim. Like much of the Southeast, it typically ranks among the worst in the country for allergies and air pollution. The area has a long growing season and abundant rainfall and is particularly bad for ragweed and pollen. ... Over the years, everyone from Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash to Bob Dylan and Uncle Kracker have recorded here. Overholt estimates that about 50 of his patients are singers, and they all complain of the same things: hoarseness, poor tone and limited vocal range. ...
- CKX Appoints Michael Ferrel President; Robert Sillerman to Continue As Chairman, CEO
(Yahoo! Finance / Associated Press, May 23, 2005)
CKX Inc., producer of the "American Idol" television show and manager of the Elvis Presley estate, said Monday that it appointed Michael G. Ferrel as president. Chairman and Chief Executive Robert F.X. Sillerman had also been serving as president since he bought the company in February. He will continue in these roles, the company said. Ferrel previously served as president and chief executive of Sillerman's SFX Entertainment, a promoter of entertainment events now owned by Clear Channel Entertainment Inc. CKX shares fell 7 cents to close at $24.78 on the Nasdaq.
- No angel
By Peter Conrad
(Sunday Observer, May 22, 2005)
Wooed by Elvis from the age of 14, Priscilla Presley was subject to the King's every whim when she became his wife. How can she say she still loves him? Did Elvis ever really leave the building? It is almost 30 years since he died - bloated, drug-befuddled, gun-mad - in the tacky opulence of Graceland, but not since Christ quit the tomb on the third day has any death seemed so provisional. His daughter Lisa Marie, nine at the time, spent the days before the funeral in the room with his body, willing him to reconsider. Resurrection, as it happened, was more or less immediate. Supermarket tabloids soon reported sightings of an undead Elvis, and imitators in spangled capes lip-synched to his records in Las Vegas. His body, like Christ's, was available for consumption by true believers: a rumour alleged that Presleyburgers had been made from his minced corpse and distributed like communion wafers to 'New York and West Coast rock aristocracy'. Less favoured acolytes made do with the fetishistic heirlooms they traded. Locks of his hair, dyed the blue-black of a raven's wing, still sell for thousands of dollars. His ghost, made of sequinned ectoplasm, materialises in Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train. In 1979 an underground film exhumed the cadaver (this time unminced) for a farewell concert tour, at the end of which its putrid flesh was sliced off and sold piecemeal.
The Elvis myth exists to deny death, or to console us for its undeniability. Nevertheless, it's likely that whatever is left of him reposes in the meditation garden at Graceland, beneath a bronze plaque doubly emblazoned with a cross and his personal logo - a lightning bolt to signal the electric energy that caused his pelvis to jerk and quake, with the initials TCB as a reminder to Take Care of Business, the motto of his Memphis entourage. Elvis is gone, but his widow Priscilla remains with us, and she was in London last week to promote a book and a memorial video documentary about him; he may have mouldered, but she still looks exactly like the 14-year-old he began to woo while he was a GI in Germany in 1959. Myths repudiate death, and cosmetic surgery has its own way of slyly refuting time. 'She looked like a little doll,' cooed Elvis's cousin Patsy when the schoolgirl Priscilla, surrendered by her parents, came to live at Graceland as both his ward and bedmate. Priscilla, now 60, is still doll-like - dainty, impenetrably painted, with waxen cheeks and a pursed mouth that is under too much duress, after the tightening she has undergone, to blab out secrets. A face not lived in has no way of registering her distress. Her eyes, pinioned open, continue to look at the world with dazed wonder, and her voice is that of a breathy, tentative teenager.
She is, whether she admits it or not, a damaged creature. 'I was someone he created,' she told me when we met. 'I was just a kid, and I was consumed by him. I could never speak my mind; all I desired was not to disappoint him.' Elvis dictated the colour of her hair, which was dyed as inkily as his own and then teased into gravity-defying cones; he insisted on the mascara that turned her eyes into volcanic craters, and the false lashes that flapped above them like nocturnal birds; he picked out the tarty costumes she wore when she came home from Catholic school, shed her uniform, and began to play what she calls 'his femme fatale'. He dosed her with uppers to adjust her moods, and deprived her of her favourite food, tuna salad, because he disliked its smell. 'Yes, he was quite critical. What you're seeing,' said Priscilla, pointing to her transfixed face, 'is the product of constant criticism.' Elvis once caught her frowning as she glanced up from her homework, and gave her a slap on the forehead to warn her that it was wrinkling. 'If I looked up, it had to be with my eyes only, so the skin would stay smooth. See, I'm so well trained that I can't do it now even if I want to!' She illustrated: her brow has indeed been immobilised, ironed flat.
Elvis 'was committed to my purity', as Priscilla puts it. He courted her like one of the pining minstrels in medieval romance, and left her unsullied after she moved in with him. Until their marriage in 1967, they contented themselves with heavy petting. Consummation was adjourned until the wedding night in Las Vegas; the result was immediate impregnation. The criticism continued. 'Elvis was always talking about women who let themselves go when they were expecting, who used it as an excuse to gain weight. So I actually lost eight pounds when I was carrying! I ate only eggs and apples, I never drank milk. No, I wasn't allowed to see a doctor. Elvis didn't like to have new people around. We were in a cocoon at Graceland.' The birth of their daughter resulted in a wounding sexual rejection. Elvis felt, according to Priscilla's testimony in the book, that 'he just couldn't have sex with a woman who'd had a child'. When I asked her about this, she revised the record, although the book reports on the end of 'intimacy'. 'No, no, of course we were having sex! I mean, he was Elvis after all, and I must say he was very creative, very playful.' Despite this fervour, I was reminded of Lisa Marie's assertion - in a television interview during her brief marriage to Michael Jackson - that she and Jacko were rabbiting away in the nuptial suite at Neverland. So why did Elvis embargo postpartum intercourse? 'Oh,' said Priscilla a little prissily, 'I guess he had a madonna complex.'
The marriage unravelled, and they were divorced in 1973. 'He was still very lovey with me, but only upstairs, when the guys weren't around to impress. He was a Southern boy, a man's man, and girls were kept out of sight. The other wives and I were only allowed to leave Memphis and go to Vegas at certain times - first nights or last nights. That left Elvis and his buddies free to be bad boys with the showgirls in between! Not that I was any angel. Eventually I took on someone.' The euphemism is characteristic. Priscilla's maiden name is Beaulieu (pronounced Bewlew) and she is as much of a genteel Southern belle as Tennessee Williams's Blanche du Bois. When my more mobile brow furrowed in puzzlement, she lisped a shy clarification: 'I took a lover. It was my way out.'
What, I wondered, were the demons that drove Elvis? She thought him vulnerable, and wanted to nurture him; a child herself, she had to replace the mother he lost a year before they met. 'He was criticised when he was growing up for the way he looked, the way he wore his hair - just like he criticised me - and that must have been quite impactful. People laughed at him because he was very fussy, he'd always carry his own utensils when he went out to eat because he didn't want germs.' I'd read that he was unhappy with his body, even though his fans worshipped it as a phallic totem. Was it true that he disliked his spindly legs? 'I'm not quite agreeing about the legs,' said Priscilla. 'All I would say is that he always wore a T-shirt when we were at the beach or in the ocean. He thought, being Elvis, that he should have a hairier chest. Of course if it were now he'd be waxing off the few hairs he did have!'
Graceland was the court of an absolute monarch, whose nocturnal habits were fuelled by benzedrine. Priscilla has her own cautious way of describing his manic whims: 'Well, Elvis was very spontaneous. It would be, "Now we're all gonna go horse-back riding, or out on our motor bikes. Or we're gonna take the plane to Vegas." And you couldn't say you didn't want to.' As at court, the corridors were thick with whispers, and the paranoid king suspected his fawning entourage of treachery. 'He'd call on the intercom every morning to see who was in the kitchen before he went down to have his breakfast. He didn't like it if there was someone in the room who was on the outs. Often it was a family member wanting money.' After their separation, Priscilla watched as Elvis simultaneously inflated and imploded. His body ballooned, choked with bacon cheeseburgers and pint tubs of ice cream, and he hid it behind jewelled capes or inside cavernous jumpsuits; his act became louder, more hollowly self-parodic. 'He was terribly insecure by the end. People were always saying to him, "You didn't fill up the room today, it wasn't a sell-out." Sometimes they had to curtain off whole areas of seating to make it look less empty. No one could tell him he had a problem, or get him to deal with his addictions. Just think - if he were alive now, he'd be in his early seventies, and remember how good Cary Grant looked when he was that age!'
Despite Priscilla's fond reverie, I find it hard to imagine Elvis as a dapper pensioner, elegant despite arthritis and a toupee. Premature death ensured his immortality, and led almost immediately to a flurry of reincarnations - the claims in the tabloids that his statue had been found on Mars, the plaster statuettes sold like votive icons, the annual competitions in Vegas for Elvis clones. After his death, Priscilla conferred another kind of immortality on him: she incorporated him. She set up Elvis Presley Enterprises Inc. which runs Graceland as a museum and controls commercial rights to his image; her book, the DVD and a new set of CDs are the latest attempts to perpetuate the franchise. 'No, I never did anything out of revenge,' she said when I asked about her motives for taking that lover. But her triumph over the man who divorced her has been sweet and lucrative. 'I loved him, I still love him,' she told me, and her behaviour is wistfully reverential. But demolition is also part of the agenda: Priscilla knocked down the house Elvis occupied in Los Angeles, bronzed the bricks, then shipped them to Graceland for sale as souvenirs.
She speaks now about 'the bigness of Elvis Presley'. What you notice about Priscilla is her littleness - her frailty, and her bemusement at what has happened to her. It would be easy to call the adolescent who beguiled Elvis a nymphet, like Nabokov's Lolita. But she looks to me like one of those nymphs who in classical fables were snatched by a passing god and whipped off to heaven where they were flattered, pleasured and shown the view from on top of the world before, when the fickle deity tired, being dumped back on earth again. If Priscilla could look up (which she knows it's unwise to do) she would probably be scrutinising the sky and asking it the same questions she heard Elvis repeating during his sessions with the gurus he consulted: 'Why me? Why was I chosen?' And if she had a single request, it would probably be the one she made when Lisa Marie phoned her in Los Angeles to tell her that Elvis had died: 'Send the plane for me.'
[The Guardian has always been anti-Elvis - ed.]
- HOW I... TURNED GREEN (AND INTO ELVIS)
(Kansas City Star, May 22, 2005)
He looks and sounds a lot like the real deal, but why is this Elvis singing about his "Green Suede Shoes" and "Earth Day Rock"? Because this is Kansas City's own Green Elvis, who - when he;s out of his sparkly green jumpsuit - is also known as Matt Riggs, whose job is to educate the public about recycling. He works for the Mid-America Regional Council. ...
- Elvis, Caesar ... what's old is new [Review]
By Jack Zink
(Sun-Sentinel, May 22, 2005)
ALL SHOOK UP: This "jukebox" musical, built around the Elvis catalog, is the closest the genre has come to art since Mamma Mia! Joe Pietro, a successful off-Broadway writer, has created a cute country-western piffle with elements vaguely reminiscent of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night. Cheyenne Jackson makes the leap from ensemble/understudy roles to leading hunk, a combination of Elvis Presley and early Marlon Brando. He's Chad, a lonesome stranger "in the middle of a square state, in the middle of a square decade, in a square little town," where the air soon fills with the Elvis songbook. Jackson's not an Elvis impersonator, and the music is given new settings to fit the story and a big chorus. Though it's an ugly duckling awards-wise, when the Broadway dust settles, look for this one on a touring season announcement near you. (Palace Theatre, 1564 Broadway)
- Something stupid: A 'fresh' Sinatra bio serves up the same old dish
By SHERRYL CONNELLY
(New York Daily News, May 22, 2005)
Frank Sinatra could be thuggish and Elvis Presley ate bad food. Tell us something we don't know. Anthony Summers in "Sinatra: The Life" pretends to offer a daring retrospective of Ol' Blue Eyes, the scrawny guy from Hoboken who could, uh, sing.
But what's missing from Summers' biography, written with his wife Robbyn Swan, is the man, never mind his music. In its pages we meet a lowlife who hit the high life, not the artist who could texture a lyric to make bobbysoxers swoon and, later, grown men feel understood. The headline news from the book is that Sinatra was nearly caught performing as a mob courier, carrying $3.5 million in 1946, according to Jerry Lewis. A New York customs agent ordered his bag open, but Sinatra's fans saved him by jostling so close, the agent sent him on his way.
Sinatra always denied his mob connections, but everyone felt they knew better. Certainly Johnny Fontaine, the mob-beseeching singer in "The Godfather," seemed to blow his cover. Sinatra was clearly the model. But the authors seem not to recognize how well versed we are in everything Frank. Curiously, then, they merely recite sensational charges. A woman claims that Sinatra raped her when he was 53 and she 20. An actress says she gave birth to his child, but when she approached Sinatra to meet her then 19-year-old daughter, he claimed through an attorney that he was "too busy with other family problems" to oblige.
We are treated to the size of Sinatra's sexual endowment in the same droning voice the authors employ to report on his ongoing relationship with gangster Lucky Luciano. Even the heat of Sinatra's great passion for Ava Gardner is somehow lost. Married in 1951 as his career plummeted, they split up in 1953, and he was famously tormented by her through the years. Yet in this account, the drama reads like old news. Which, in fact, it is, and that's the problem with "Sinatra: The Life." Even as Summers and Swan earnestly present the evidence that Sinatra had an affinity for gangsters, treated women like dames and put away too much liquor, there's little to learn. Kitty Kelley already wrote that book on Sinatra ("His Way") and in 1986 it read like new news. ...
- Something's OUT THERE
By Parizaad Khan
(Pune Newsline, May 21, 2005)
WE'VE heard that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, Elvis still lives and man didn't really land on the moon. There's also our desi one that Subhash Chandra Bose didn't die in a plane crash but was alive as late as 1997. Sure Shyam Benegal doesn't try and tell that story in Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero, but people still believe he's alive. We asked some celebs for their favourite conspiracy theories. ...
- The way I see it: So long live the king
By Janet Devlin
(Belfast Telegraph, May 21, 2005)
ELVIS Presley is a bigger industry dead than he ever was alive. And he was pretty big when he was alive. However, I hesitate to attach any but the best motivation to the family's decision to make Elvis By The Presleys (9pm, Wed, ITV). Priscilla, her mother and father, daughter Lisa Marie, an aunt, and one of the 'Memphis Mafia' contributed their memories of The King.
A touching, sometimes joyous, often sad, tribute featured film from the Presley Estate Archives and the family's own private collection. They charted the phenomenal talent, fantastic good looks and fatal charm that were Elvis. But they also revealed a stubborn streak, a bad temper and a tendency to stray from the marital straight-and-narrow.
Priscilla, who was extraordinarily pretty in her youth, looked as weird as a shopfront mannequin. In an effort to retain her looks, she has obviously gone down the Cher path of surgery, Botox and acid face peels. She was unflinchingly honest, though, confessing that despite her great love of the man, she couldn't maintain the role of a dutiful, silent, long-suffering wife. It was the separation that inevitably followed her yearning for a life of her own that sent Elvis into a spiral of self-destruction. He left this life in August 1977, but the King will never die...
- Forum: 'Elvis' on your driver's license?
By Seth Borenstein
(Washington Times, May 21, 2005)
The REAL ID Act has many Americans, especially civil libertarians, up in arms. They are concerned "Big Brother" has encroached upon the fine line between security and intrusion. While we are all well-advised to guard against an ever-intrusive government, it serves no good purpose to denigrate legislation simply because special interest groups are trying to persuade us to believe something sinister is afoot. When read the actual verbiage, the REAL ID Act - devoid of the inserted rhetoric of reactionaries - doesn't set up a super-secret clandestine conspiratorial network. There are no government minions deep inside any hollowed mountain keeping tabs on what kind of milk we buy. ... The only people affected by the REAL ID Act are those here illegally. ...
- 'Elvis' sightings helped keep woodpecker's existence secret
By Seth Borenstein
(Yahoo! News / Knight Ridder Newspapers, May 21, 2005)
Scientists kept the biggest secret in biology for 14 months while they worked on plans to protect the ivory-billed woodpecker. In February 2004, Gene Sparling, an amateur but experienced birder, made the first known sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker in 60 years, but he and more than two dozen scientists, conservationists, politicians, reporters and even three girls aged 11 to 14 managed to keep the secret until April 2005. This allowed the Nature Conservancy to buy up some nearby land and get options on more, the federal government to work on woodpecker protection plans, and scientists to keep studying and notch six more confirmed sightings of the bird. It was crucial to keeping the bird and its habitat from being overrun and to allow scientists to make sure of what they saw, said Scott Simon, Arkansas director of the Nature Conservancy. The researchers even kept their own colleagues - and in some cases their own families - in the dark. So they had to find a way to refer to what they were doing without letting others in on their secret.
Enter Elvis Presley and the much-spoofed rumors that he's still alive. Whenever scientists spotted an ivory-billed woodpecker here they'd refer in e-mails and phone calls to seeing Elvis to try to keep the world from flooding this swamp with sightseers before they were ready, said Jon Andrew, regional chief of the National Wildlife Refuge System, one of the handful of federal officials in on the secret. As they looked for the birds' roosts, they referred to the hunt as tracking Priscilla, Elvis' wife. The messages were "we just found Elvis," Andrew said. Colleagues who heard these messages but weren't in on the secret "thought we were joking around," said Sam Hamilton, regional chief of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Scientists kept spotting Elvis: seven times officially, 16 times less-confirmed. And yet, the ivory-billed woodpecker remained extinct to the rest of the world.
- Elvis By The Presleys
(The Times of India, May 21, 2005)
Elvis Presley drews huge crowds even 28 years after his death. A book on the "The King" authored by his actor wife Priscilla Presley drew in huge crowds. Fans queued up to see the woman who was Elvis' wife for six years and get their copy of Elvis By The Presleys autographed by her. Over 500 fans - men and women in their 20s, couples in their 80s , Elvis impersonators - all queued up and waited patiently at Waterstones in London's Oxford Street. ...
Priscilla Presley, the former wife of Elvis Presley, looks over at the cover of the Elvis Presley album of his 31 number one hit
(Photo: Reuters)
- New DVD on Elvis's life released
(NDTV, May 21, 2005)
A new DVD that chronicles the life and projects of the King of Rock and Roll Elvis Presley has been released recently. Called 'Elvis by the Presleys,' the DVD is billed as the most revealing and poignant video portrait ever seen of the artist as husband, father and friend. For the first time, Priscilla, Lisa Marie and other family members freely share their own stories, emotions and intimate memories on camera. They also revealed home-movie footage of the legend, never before shared with his fans. The two-DVD set also includes live performance footage from every stage of Elvis's career, plus clips from newsreels, interviews, film and TV appearances.
Go to earlier articles
|
